If you're stuck with relatives and trying to decide on a heart-warmer for the holidays, make it Tom Cruise's Valkyrie, about Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's aborted bid to kill Hitler within the chancellor's own ranks. And if your friends give you weird looks the next day, you can use one of these five handy excuses for why the United Artists' bid for Best Picture wasn't so bad after all. Because what, like it can be any worse than Marley & Me?

It's not Lions for Lambs: 2

The only other Cruise feature that United Artists put out after the Scientologist and Paula Wagner became the studio's co-chairs was the terrible Lions for Lambs. Ostensibly about scholars and government officials debating the war in Iraq, the film came off at best like a conservative's Inconvenient Truth (all that talking and theorizing!), at worst, like a pedantic and boring pre-Surge apologist film.

At least World War II is over and history has already dictated who won, so there won't be any of those long, long skirting around the issues monologues as Robert Redford and Meryl Street Act (with a capital "a") and Tom Cruise tries to keep up.

Tom Cruise's reinvention as a serious artist is better than his reinvention as a crazy person

Unfortunately, we're not out of the woods yet. When giving an interview to MTV about his interest in Valkyrie, Cruise managed to blurt out one crazyism that brought us all back to the Oprah-couch-jumping, maniacally cackling, Holmes-brainwashing days when he mentioned that Jews and Scientologists are "two sometimes-persecuted groups."

Um, right, Tom. The only thing Jews and Scientologists have in common is that they both run Hollywood. Zing! But it is somewhat of a relief to have the old, egocentric Tom Cruise back: In the ominous months leading up to Valkyrie's release, someone obviously told Tom that it would be great if he could just scale back on his public persona, just a tiny bit. And he even made fun of himself in Tropic Thunder, playing a foul-mouth, paunch producer that showed America that even Jerry Maguire knows how crazy he comes off sometimes. So if nothing else, support Tom Cruise in his decision to reinvent himself in the public eye as a serious, if somewhat eccentric actor. At least this way he's not talking about the history of psychology.

The supporting cast is unbeatable

Eddie Izzard. Kenneth Branagh. Tom Wilkinson. That guy who played Zod in Superman. Those are four awesome reasons right there to see the film. And the guy in charge of promoting Valkyrie knew it too, or else the central image of Cruise in the eye-patch wouldn't have been changed to a more cast-heavy poster. If you aren't a fan of Cruise's "acting," you have to at least admit that, as a producer, he had sense enough to give his lineup enough heavy-hitters to carry the film.

No annoying accents
Who wants to watch Tom Cruise struggle for 120 minutes with a German accent? Now that would have been an unspeakable horror.

It's not a Holocaust downer

There are a shit ton of Holocaust movies coming out soon: The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, The Reader, Adam Resurrected, Good and Defiance. Luckily, Valkyrie only touches marginally on the whole "war crimes" aspect of the time period, just enough to dip its toe into Oscar waters.

Alan Zilberman over at BrightestYoungThings summed it up perfectly:

Valkyrie does not care about the atrocities of World War 2. It does care about that an entire nation could adopt a viewpoint that’s fundamentally wrong. Hitler’s horrors are brought up briefly in the opening monologue, and are never considered again. Valkyrie instead presupposes that Hitler’s assassination is a near-impossible undertaking, and that these men deserve special distinction.

You know what? Thank God this movie wasn't about the camps, or about Hitler's invasion of Poland, or any of that stuff. It's Christmas for chrissake—time to watch a Bryan Singer film where a lot of shit blows up, not somberly reflect on the atrocities of war or revisit Schindler's List. Thankfully, Valkyrie doesn't.